Australian Warplanes Took Part in Airstrikes That Killed Syrian Troops
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Australia has said its warplanes took part in US-led airstrikes in eastern Syria that killed Syrian army troops in an incident threatening to wreck an already tenuous ceasefire before it is a week old.
Russia’s military said it was told by the Syrian army that at least 62 soldiers were killed in the attack on a government position near Deir ez-Zour, with more than 100 wounded. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 90 soldiers were killed.
The first airstrikes on Aleppo since the ceasefire began on Monday evening were reported on Sunday.
An Australian defense department statement said its jets had targeted Syrian army positions. The statement claimed Australian warplanes mistook army positions for Daesh (ISIL) fighters.
“Overnight, coalition aircraft were conducting airstrikes in eastern Syria against what was believed to be a Daesh fighting position that the coalition had been tracking for some time,” the statement said.
“However, shortly after the bombing commenced, Russian officials advised the Combined Air Operations Centre that the targets may have been Syrian military personnel.”
“While Syria remains a dynamic and complex operating environment, Australia would never intentionally target a known Syrian military unit or actively support Daesh,” the statement claimed, offering condolences to the families of the dead and pledging to cooperate with a US inquiry.
The US has also offered condolences and claimed similarly that the airstrikes were a mistake. It said it had targeted Tharda mountain where a Syrian government offensive was seeking to capture Daesh positions overlooking the Deir ez-Zour military airport.
Damascus said it had succeeded in taking Tharda despite the US bombing, and rejected Washington’s insistence that it had hit Syrian troops in error. A foreign ministry statement said that Syrian positions had been repeatedly attacked in strikes that were “on purpose and planned in advance”.
Russia has warned that the incident puts a “very big question mark” over the future of a precarious ceasefire agreed by Washington and Moscow, and a strongly worded foreign ministry statement on Sunday said that the strikes were “on the boundary between criminal negligence and direct connivance with Islamic State terrorists”.
It said the incident was a result of Washington’s “stubborn refusal” to cooperate with Moscow in fighting Isis, the Nusra Front – now renamed Jabhat Fateh al Sham – and “other terrorist groups”.
The Russian foreign ministry statement also described US explanations at an emergency UN security council session on Saturday night as an “an unconstructive and indistinct position”.
US officials “not only turned out to be unable to give an adequate explanation of what happened, but also tried, as is their custom, to turn everything upside down”, the statement said.
